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Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into
myself; becoming external to all other things and
self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than
ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the
noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing
within It by having attained that activity; poised above
whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet,
there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning,
and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens
that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter
into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high
thing it has shown itself to be.
Heraclitus, who urges the examination of this matter, tells of
compulsory alternation from contrary to contrary, speaks of
ascent and descent, says that "change reposes," and that "it is
weariness to keep toiling at the same things and always beginning
again"; but he seems to teach by metaphor, not concerning himself
about making his doctrine clear to us, probably with the idea
that it is for us to seek within ourselves as he sought for
himself and found.
Empedocles- where he says that it is law for faulty souls to
descend to this sphere, and that he himself was here because he
turned a deserter, wandered from God, in slavery to a raving
discord- reveals neither more nor less than Pythagoras and his
school seem to me to convey on this as on many other matters; but
in his case, versification has some part in the obscurity.
We have to fall back on the illustrious Plato, who uttered many
noble sayings about the soul, and has in many places dwelt upon
its entry into body so that we may well hope to get some light
from him.
What do we learn from this philosopher?
We will not find him so consistent throughout that it is easy to
discover his mind.
Everywhere, no doubt, he expresses contempt for all that is of
sense, blames the commerce of the soul with body as an
enchainment, an entombment, and upholds as a great truth the
saying of the Mysteries that the soul is here a prisoner. In the
Cavern of Plato and in the Cave of Empedocles, I discern this
universe, where the breaking of the fetters and the ascent from
the depths are figures of the wayfaring toward the Intellectual
Realm.
In the Phaedrus he makes a failing of the wings the cause of the
entry to this realm: and there are Periods which send back the
soul after it has risen; there are judgements and lots and fates
and necessities driving other souls down to this order.
In all these explanations, he finds guilt in the arrival of the
soul at body, But treating, in the Timaeus, of our universe he
exalts the kosmos and entitles it a blessed god, and holds that
the soul was given by the goodness of the creator to the end that
the total of things might be possessed of intellect, for thus
intellectual it was planned to be, and thus it cannot be except
through soul. There is a reason, then, why the soul of this All
should be sent into it from God: in the same way the soul of each
single one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete; it
was necessary that all beings of the Intellectual should be
tallied by just so many forms of living creatures here in the
realm of sense.
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